Kidder, Peabody & Co.

DBQ in Trading

DBQ saves both time and resources for Kidder, Peabody & Co. Christopher Yuknek, Vice President of Kidder, Peabody & Co. Inc. uses a combined Stratus, Tandem and PC environment for his company's over the counter trading system. He and his staff use DBQ for debugging, testing, and creating custom reports for traders both for his own company and for other houses with which they do business.

Kidder, Peabody & Co. is a worldwide financial trading house. Christopher Yuknek, Vice President and project leader for over the counter trading systems, has been a DBQ customer since 1991. The following interview between Application Resources and Mr. Yuknek took place at the offices of Kidder, Peabody & Co. located in the financial district of New York City.

How does your trading system work?

Yuknek: Our traders trade both their own inventory and with customers over the phone. When a Kidder customer wants to do businesss, he calls up his branch office and say he wants to buy or sell stock. A branch operator then writes up a ticket and types it into a Tandem machine which is connected by hyperchannel to our Stratus machine here in New York. The Stratus then validates, processes the ticket, and sends it up to the trader at a PC in New York, Boston, or LA. The Stratus machine talks to NASDQ via a Tandem machine.

What do you use DBQ for?

Yuknek: We use DBQ for a lot of things: creating individually tailored reports, looking at test data, debugging, etc.

How many people are using DBQ?

Yuknek: There are about a dozen of us producing reports on a daily basis, and forty more drawing information from those reports.

How do you use DBQ for reports?

Yuknek: We use DBQ for creating reports that we process for traders. For example, business that we do not make markets in, we preference different houses via the SOES system. So every night our traders want to get a report that watches what symbols changed. Who did we preference? Did any preferences change? We use DBQ to compare information in our files and produce a report that shows the old preferences and what changed for that day.

DBQ also helps in other ways. For example: If a trader had a stock that traded heavy today, seven million records or so, he may want a print up of what he did, what time it was sent, and other particular fields. With DBQ, I can give him exactly the fields he wants. It kind of personalizes every report. Every time we get a request, I'm in DBQ, using it for different needs. Instead of telling someone "I'll have it for you in a few days," I can say, "I'll have it for you in an hour."

How does it help in testing?

Yuknek: Just in debugging there are a lot of uses. For example, if you write a bad a record, you want a clean way to view your record on screen.

How many people besides yourself use it for debugging?

Yuknek: All twelve programmer uses it for that. For instance: If I do a few test trades, I may expect seven different results from them. Now as a programmer, I want a printout to show me the seven results without writing a program to do it. That's what DBQ does.

I used to work with CICS and other products on COBOL systems where you'd have to write a ten page program to get that information, one that could format results in seven different ways. Now we just put it into DBQ and we get it back. If you don't like the format, you change it. If you like it today but want to change it tomorrow, or in fifteen minutes, you can. You don't have to write anything at all.

Imagine if you had to write a program to produce your reports and then you had to edit it all the time. If a trader didn't like the way a header came out, you'd have to go in, change it, and compile it every single time. DBQ is much easier.

Does DBQ help your efficiency?

Yuknek: Definitely. In the nature of this business, in trading, when a trader wants information, he wants it five minutes ago. You don't have the time to say "I'll give it to you tomorrow or the next day." When I can say to a client "you'll have it in a minute," they say "that's great!"

A trader may call and say, "show me all the trades I did today with Merrill-Lynch." I reply, "Fine. Give me a moment." Then I go in to DBQ, run an execution for Merrill, create a report and fax it over to them electronically via the Stratus. Just like that. All done in fifteen minutes and everybody moves on to more business.

Any closing comments?

Yuknek: With DBQ, your clients like you better, because you can personalize things for them. Everything in business is attached to cost and time. If you had to write a program to do reports all the time, you'd have to take as little time as possible for that, so if a client wanted something different you would have to say "Too bad. Get what you want from this," or you could say, "this is going to take a week and you will be billed this much at the end of the month." At Kidder Peabody we don't want to do that. If my client calls up and asks for something, I customize it with DBQ and say, "I'll have this for you in a few minutes. Just like that!